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Friday, August 23, 2013

If free will really cannot be coerced, ever, by anybody or anything...

Posted on 11:07 PM by Unknown
*

...then things begin to make sense.

*

Since the idea of genuine, radical, incoercible free will began to sink in; things begin to make sense that never did - about the way things work, about history, about our relation to God and Satan.

If we regard everything as an enticement of our choice, in a situation where choice cannot be compelled by anybody or anything (not even God) - then this fits with what happens in the Bible, with knowledge, with experience, with intuition.

*

The fact that so many people for so many reasons (mostly bad, but some mistaken but well motivated) deny that free will really is free, necessarily free, inviolably free - the fact that this fact is so often denied, is a matter of great and pervasive significance; it gives a false understanding of the whole nature and set-up of human existence.

And it leads to endemic and insoluble confusion, alienation, and especially evil; since the consequence is that we become creatures who use our free will to deny free will, we choose to deny our capacity for choice, we are centres of consciousness and agency which self-represent that we are merely contingent clusters of passive consequences.

*

The situation, once understood thus, is bizarre in the extreme! - yet mainstream, not just in the secular world but in most religions, including most of Christianity.

Perhaps this is the most destructive way to mess with somebody's head; to entice them to deny that of what every spontaneous instinct and perspective convinces them naturally and with total certainty: that they are ultimately free, autonomous, an un-caused cause.

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